Free Analytics and User Demographics from Quantcast

Free Analytics and User Demographics from Quantcast

If you’re looking for a free way to learn more about your visitors’ demographics, I’ve got a pretty simple (and free) solution for you. Quantcast. And while this isn’t a new tool at all, it was new to me a couple months back when I began testing it out.

Around 2 months or so and I was checking out the Advertising Page on BBGeeks. Shortly thereafter, I saw that Sugarrae had the Quantcast code on her blog, too.


I thought it was really cool how BBGeeks presented their demographics as well as a link for a complete website profile. There were slick graphs, solid targeting information for potential advertisers and an overview of traffic growth over time.

I wrongly assumed the data came from a purchased analytics package of sorts. But, it’s all free and you can sign up for the same data if you’d like to capture it for your site.

That’s what I’ve been doing since having signed up. If you’re willing to tag your site, here’s some of the information you can acquire and provide…

Demographics

You can have Quantcast record user data for all of the visitors on your site. You can choose any combination of the following (selected via checkbox) when you’re managing your site profiles:

  • Age
  • Children
  • Gender
  • Education
  • Income
  • Ethnicity

Showing Traffic Information

When visitors access your site profile they can also view traffic information should you want them to. My blog is lucky if it is read by more than a dozen people a day, so I figured I didn’t have much to lose.

Here’s what my graph looks like:

And… Here’s what a kick ass graph looks like (from bbgeeks):

These graphs are obviously available to anyone should you opt to allow them to display.

You can get a deeper breakdown of traffic data too.  Here’s an example of what I’m referring to with the stats for my site:

Check out those weekly numbers! See, blogging nonsense like I have been for the past week seriously pays off.

Lifestyle & Audience Data

Since my site’s traffic is that of a small Amish Pennsylvania town, there’s no good lifestyle data available for me. Other sites that do receive some sort of traffic will show three cool reports… What the site’s Audience Also Likes in terms of categories (like “technology”, “auto industry”, “politics” etc.), what the Audience Also Visits in terms of other domains, and finally, what keywords the Audience Also Searches For.

All pretty cool stuff. Nothing Earth shattering, but cool.

Demographics & Visitor Classification

The actual demographics that you can pull are much more interesting to me. Since my site has a limited audience, I’m sure these graphics are skewed a bit, but check out the breakdown available:

The Quantcast Media Planner

Finally, once you’re a verified account holder and have the code on your site you can opt to include your site in the Quantcast Media Planner which showcases sites and allows readers and advertisers to drill down using demographics to locate potential advertising partners.

In other words, if you’re open to selling some ad space… This can be a great money making opportunity too.

As always, play around with this and see what you can get out of it. So far I’ve been more than impressed considering it took seconds to setup and hasn’t cost me a dime yet. :)

2 thoughts on “Free Analytics and User Demographics from Quantcast

  1. Eric,
    Thanks for reviewing Quantcast. I’ve used in the past, but didn’t completely understand where the data was coming from.

    Also, don’t sell small Amish Pennsylvania towns short. “It’s not quantity, but quality baby!”

  2. I happened upon this blog post through Google while searching to figure out how to use this Quantcast. I see how to read my traffic, but how do I determine the actual demographics? I see the tabs at the top but they are darkened and not clickable. I hate to ask as I am sure you are super busy and don’t have time to help little ol’ me, but I was hoping you could lend a tip? Maybe write a blog post about how to get access to that data or maybe it’s because I have only been using this for a few days …?? Does it take longer to determine the demographics?

    Thanks for any help you can provide :-)

    Brandy

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